The gorilla toolkit's APIs are inadequate and it seemed like quite a few people agreed too because most of them said they rolled their own solutions to do things that certain gorilla libs did but with a more intuitive and friendly API.
Go really isn't that young either. It's been what at least 4 years now? There's no excuse. It's not like the language is 6 months old.
As for re-inventing stuff, it's more so go's ecosystem rather than revel's shortcomings although revel does have its own shortcomings if you were to compare it to something like rails and not express.
Revel seems to be somewhere in between rails and express in terms of opinions which is fine but if it's going to make me less productive then I'm simply not going to use it.
1.5 if you count from the first stable release. Which IMHO is what matters, before was just a experiment with a lot of uncertainties. It took ruby 9 years to arrive from 1.0 to Rails. They were other times, sure, but still.
I still consider it very young, or at least I don't know of any other younger language with a better ecosystem.
> Revel seems to be somewhere in between rails and express in terms of opinions which is fine but if it's going to make me less productive then I'm simply not going to use it.
Well, everyone has their preferences, certainly in Go there are not many choices so is not for everyone. But I'd keep an eye on it. Things can change very quickly.
9 months to me is a huge amount of time. I don't want to have to wait years to be super productive. I want to be super productive right now and by using other platforms I can be.
For a new viable web platform to be accepted it needs to really explode in popularity. It has to offer MASSIVE gains.
Look at node, it offers performance and also offers the benefit of using the same language on both ends. That's pretty neat... maybe, but I think you would at least agree with me that node's popularity and growth has been unmatched. Even so, it's still quite far behind rails and I don't think it will catch up.
I'm not some massive rails fan boy either. I only started using it when 4.0 came out because the ease of caching seemed interesting to me and I was looking for an excuse to go from node/express to something more opinionated just to see if it was more productive.
Of course I agree. But node is an unique case, since javascript is not exactly new, and had a trillion people using it when node appeared. You can not expect that to happen again any time soon, unless all main browsers start supporting client-side PHP or something crazy like that.
Go is not 'there' yet, sure, and maybe it'll never be. But its growth can not be judged by node's standards, no really new language could compete then.
For a new language is growing quite good: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=golang#q=golang&cmpt=...
Of course this doesn't mean you have to use it, but IMHO it can not be regarded as a failure in anyway.